Facebook said Thursday it had launched legal action against OneAudience, an American company that the social networking giant suspects of having improperly used the personal data of its users. The New Jersey-based company "paid developers to install malware in their apps" to "collect data from users on Facebook and other social networks," said the American group.
The social network had already seized a court of the state of California last May against the South Korean firm Rankwave which exploited several applications to collect personal data for advertising and marketing purposes. The assignment of OneAudience "is our latest effort to protect people and face those who abuse the technology industry and its users," said the company.
A program implemented in 2018
The network says it discovered the abusive practices of this company through its "Data Abuse Bounty" program, implemented in 2018 to reward engineers who reveal abuses in the use of data by application developers. The platform with 2.5 billion monthly active users has been trying since 2018 to get rid of its bad reputation for respecting personal information, after a series of scandals on this subject.
Facebook was fined some 4.5 billion euros last summer by the agency responsible for consumer protection and competition (FTC). The reason: not having been able to protect the private data of its users.
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- High-Tech
- Personal data
- United States
- Data
- Justice